Michael Kelley and Tavis MacLeod of Video Shoppe (photo by Gabrielle Choiniere)
Drum machine claps, new wave guitars, fuzzy bass lines, and glistening keys — Video Shoppe is back. 2022’s Echo Death is the latest offering since 2020’s For Promotional Use Only Vol. 2 and finds the VS boys picking up right where they left off, with Michael Kelley’s eerie instrumental setting the scene for Tavis MacLeod’s hypnotic words. “Echo Death” is a gothy five song EP that was appreciatively dropped in the middle of this month (October).
VS are bringing new game to the vocals this time around: listen closely as this latest offering keeps moving. MacLeod might jump through the octave pedal, pitch the singing up or down, or opt for both in tandem halfway through EP opener “The Breach.” He pushes into the tenor range for the follow up track “Escape You.” The effect of the shapeshifting vocal brings eclectic delivery styles, like a one man vaporwave posse-cut.
Video Shoppe is catchy in a nostalgic way, the name itself is a reference to days of yore when people would have to consume video by physically having to get up and out of the house, travel to a store, bump into a frenemy while trapped in between one aisle that says “Jen’s Picks” and another that says “Terry Gilliam,” talk to a clerk fumbling with a store computer using video cataloging software written for DOS, go home, and hope the video is rewound.
Echo Death sounds damaged, tweaked and tweezed out like we’re listening to forgotten music videos from a derelict rental store that was abandoned in 1990 and recently discovered. But don’t call Echo Death lo-fi — The production level is current, more Black Marble than it is Bauhaus. Something that actually sounds like a video tape being yanked out of the cartridge features at the end of “Party Of Animals,” which kicks off with a false-start entrance and then brazenly kicks down the door with a blistering beat. The chorus of “Party of Animals”, which goes: “You can’t hide in shadows/There are no shadows here,” feels like losing myself on the dance-floor of a halloween house party, and the cops are busting in, and we’re all running away, and I’m elated.